My Return To Heart Rate Monitoring

In December 2005 a coworker gave me an old bike trainer he no longer used. It was a noisy magnetic resistance unit with a cable controller that clipped to the handlebar of my Gary Fisher Wahoo mountain bike—my only bike at the time, outfitted with slick tires instead of knobbies. It was a clunky setup even for 2005, but I made it work for a while.

Indoor training is very different now! I have a smart trainer and a Zwift membership and, as of yesterday, a Wahoo of a different kind: a Wahoo TICKR heart rate monitor. By using reward points on my credit card, I was able to purchase the TICKR for only $12.23, but even at the full retail price of $50 it seems like a good value. I tried heart rate monitoring before and I eventually abandoned it. This time I hope I will find more utility in it. And, if I don’t, then at least I won’t have spent much money on the experiment.

Buying the TICKR was motivated purely by a desire to get more out of my Zwift sessions; I don’t know whether I will use the monitor on outdoor rides. I have it set up to connect to Zwift via Bluetooth, but it also can connect via ANT+ to my Garmin cyclocomputer.

Zwift and I are still learning about each other and over time my numbers will become more accurate. But after the maiden voyage of the new heart rate monitor, it was gratifying to see this correlation between power and heart rate:

A year ago, before I had a smart trainer, I was disappointed by the obvious inaccuracies of the data I obtained from my sports watch and the way it responded to intervals. During the first couple of minutes yesterday, the TICKR wasn’t sending data to Zwift. That was despite the fact I had applied some conductive heart rate monitor gel to my chest. But I’m not worried about the data I didn’t capture during a gentle warmup. Once the sweat started to flow the TICKR was flawless. Heart rate crept up over time but it also rose and fell with changes in power output. And it fell rapidly when I started my cooldown. That’s just what we would expect.

Going forward, I will look for things like elevated heart rate without a commensurate rise in power output, as that could signal overtraining or the onset of illness. In the short term, though, overtraining is the least of my worries. I’m still trying to make more time for indoor training, and in a way the TICKR is a new “toy” that will encourage me to spend more time on Zwift.